Network polarization in online politics participatory media

Transcription

1 Network polarization in online politics participatory media David Garcia 1, Adiya Abisheva, Simon Schweighofer, Uwe Serdült +, Frank Schweitzer Chair of Systems Design, ETH Zurich, Weinbergstrasse 56/58, 8092 Zurich, Switzerland + Centre for Democracy Studies, Universität Zürich, Küttigerstrasse 21, 5000 Aarau, Switzerland August 27, 2014 Abstract Political polarization is traditionally analyzed through the ideological stances of groups and parties, but it also has a behavioral component that manifests in the interactions between individuals. We present an empirical analysis of the digital traces of politicians in politnetz.ch, a Swiss online platform focused on political activity, in which politicians interact by creating support links, comments, and likes. We analyze network polarization as the level of intraparty cohesion with respect to inter-party connectivity, finding that supports show a very strongly polarized structure with respect to party alignment. The analysis of this multiplex network shows that each layer of interaction contains relevant information, where comment groups follow topics related to Swiss politics. Our analysis reveals that polarization in the layer of likes evolves in time, increasing close to the federal elections of Furthermore, we analyze the internal social network of each party through metrics related to hierarchical structures, information efficiency, and social resilience. Our results suggest that the online social structure of a party is related to its ideology, and reveal that the degree of connectivity across two parties increases when they are close in the ideological space of a multi-party system. 1 Introduction Political polarization is an important ingredient in the functioning of a democratic system, but too much of it can lead to gridlock or even violent conflict. An excess of political homogeneity, on the other hand, may render democratic choice meaningless (Sunstein, 2003). It is therefore of fundamental interest to understand the factors shifting this delicate balance to one of the two extremes. Consequently, polarization has long been a central topic for political science. Within this article, we build on this tradition, but we also want to supplement it with several currently rather unregarded aspects. First, large parts of political polarization literature are concerned with two-party systems, particularly in the context of the United States (Waugh et al., 2009). And second, polarization is generally conceptualized on the basis of positions in ideological space (Hetherington, 2009). Commonly used measures of political polarization are derived from those two premises, and therefore conceptualize polarization as two ideological blocks (i.e. parties) drifting apart on one political dimension, while increasing their internal agreement. 1 1/34

2 Many democratic systems are characterized by more than two relevant parties, making it problematic to apply standard ideology-based measures of polarization to them (Waugh et al., 2009). Besides methodological concerns, we argue that an exclusive focus on ideological positions does not capture all aspects of the term polarization. It has been claimed that a sensible definition of polarization would have to comprise not only the ideological stances of the polarized set of individuals or parties, but also the interactions between them (Blau, 1977; Baldassarri and Bearman, 2007; Conover et al., 2011; Gruzd and Roy, 2014). At the same level of ideological polarization, we would ascribe a higher level of polarization to a set of political actors when: i) they display a bias towards positive interaction between actors of similar political positions, and ii) they tend towards negative interaction between actors with dissimilar political positions (Guerra et al., 2013; Gruzd and Roy, 2014). Assuming a feedback between opinion and network polarization, a polarized society is divided into by a small number of groups with high internal consensus and sharp disagreement between them (Flache and Macy, 2011). When establishing a social link means to agree on opinions to certain extent (Guerra et al., 2013), network polarization is defined as a phenomenon in which the underlying social network of a society is composed of highly connected subgroups with weak inter-group connectivity (Conover et al., 2011; Guerra et al., 2013). The terms clusters, modules or communities are often used as synonyms to define groups of individuals in a (social) network based on their link topology. Such assignments are usually not unique, i.e. individuals can be counted in different communities. Various algorithms for network partitioning exist to optimize this assignment, often based on the optimization of modularity metrics (Newman, 2006). By adopting a network science approach, we are able to capture and analyse the interaction aspect of polarization, and at the same time to expand the study of polarization to multi-party systems. In this work, we focus on the network of support and interaction among politicians only. This way, our analysis is performed within the context of elite polarization (Fiorina and Abrams, 2008; Hetherington, 2009), as a complementary view to previous studies of mass polarization through blogs and Twitter (Guerra et al., 2013; Gruzd and Roy, 2014). Online political participatory media, like opencongress.org 2 and politnetz.ch 3, serve as a digital representation of a political system where voters and politicians can discuss in an online medium. These political participatory media serve as crowdsourcing platforms for the proposal and discussion of policies, leaving digital traces that allow unprecedented quantitative analyses of political interaction. In this study, we present our analysis of politnetz.ch, a Swiss platform that allowed us to obtain data about online political participation. On politnetz.ch, politicians and citizens freely discuss political topics, and also weave a social network around them by expressing their support for politicians or by liking each others contributions. Though politnetz.ch is of course subject to many limitations and distortions, it can be seen as a fairly faithful online representation of Swiss politics. The plurality of Swiss politics allows us to study polarization along party, as well as along ideological lines. Additionally, the real-time quality of politnetz.ch /34

3 data enables us to analyze polarization with a very high temporal resolution. While traditional research mainly focuses on changes in polarization within years or decades (McCarty et al., 2006), we can detect them within the scope of days and weeks. This makes it possible to quantify the influence of day-to-day political events, such as elections and referendums (which are of particular relevance in Swiss politics (Serdült, 2014)). Previous works on the dynamics of polarization use agent-based modelling approaches to simulate and analyze polarization in opinion dynamics. Here, we can distinguish between two different model classes. First, models with binary opinions, often called voter models, already imply that these are opposite opinions. The question is then about the share of opposite opinions in a population of agents (Schweitzer and Behera, 2009). Some scenarios show the emergence of a majority favoring one opinion, or even the convergence of the whole population toward the same opinion, called consensus. A polarization scenario in binary opinion models results in the coexistence of opposite opinions, often with almost equal share. Second, models with continuous opinions focus on the (partial) convergence of neighboring opinions such that groups of agents with the same opinion emerge. Polarization in such models can occur if two of these groups coexist, without any possibility to reach consensus (Groeber et al., 2009). In most cases, opinion dynamics models assume an interaction between opinions and the underlying communication structure, with agents of similar opinions communicating more frequently with each other than with dissimilar agents. This can be a result of homophily (i.e., opinion difference influencing structure) or of social influence (structure influencing opinion). We will explore if those model assumptions also hold in the empirical social network of politnetz.ch. Online participatory media offer different possibilities of interaction between individuals. Online actions, such as creating a social link or commenting on a post, can be used in different context. Nevertheless, interdependencies might exist between these interaction types. For example, if users press the like button only to posts they positively comment, the liking action would not contribute additional information to the communication process. In this work, one of our goals is to quantify how much information about one interaction type is contained in another, assessing the added value of including all these interaction types in the analysis of online communities. In our analysis, we explore the three main interaction types between politicians in politnetz.ch: supports, likes, and comments, to measure the differences of politicians behavior in each interaction context. For instance, do politicians only like posts of politicians they support? Do the patterns of support among politicians project onto comments and likes? In our analysis, we aim to discover groups of politicians determined by the networks of supports, likes and comments, and not necessarily by their party affiliation. It might be the case that two politicians that are the members of the same party, might not support each other, and conversely, it can be the case that two politicians that are not the members of the same party do support each other. How often do such scenarios occur? Does the party affiliation of a politician define whom they support, like, and comment, producing network polarization? Previous works centered around the US found strong polarization between left- and right-leaning 3/34

4 politicians (Saunders and Abramowitz, 2004). However, left- and right- leaning attitudes generally coincide with party membership in the US two-party system. This way, it cannot be distinguished whether polarization is created along the left-right dimension or along party lines, which can only be differentiated in a multi-party system. The US left- and right-aligned communities also differ in their online interaction, as shown in previous works using blogs (Adamic and Glance, 2005), Twitter (Conover et al., 2011), and Youtube (Garcia et al., 2012), opening the question of whether these patterns prevail in other countries. We analyze the network topology of politnetz.ch, its evolution over time, and the topologies the social networks within each party. As a consequence, we characterize the role of elections and party ideology in network polarization, both at the party and at the global level. The fact that most politicians in politnetz.ch clearly state their party membership and make their online interaction with other politicians via likes, supports, comments publicly available, allows us to test the following hypotheses: i) political polarization is present in layers with a positive connotation, i.e. supports and likes, ii) polarization, if present, is not solely grounded upon political party alignment, but also depends on politically relevant events, such as elections, and on the distance between parties in ideological space. Finally, we ask the question of whether the social structure of parties is related to their ideology. Previous research in the US political system showed differences in online network topology between the right- and left-aligned groups (Conover et al., 2011). This opens questions whether i) there are differences in the party structures of the political systems with more than two parties, and whether ii) the pattern in the US for right- and left- subcommunities holds in a multi-party system. We study Switzerland as an example of a country with a multi-party political system, with the presence of major and minor parties and additional ideological dimensions beyond left and right. 2 Materials and methods 2.1 Politnetz data Politnetz.ch is an online platform that enhances communication among politicians and voters in Switzerland. Profiles in politnetz.ch are registered either for voters or politicians, where politician profiles have an additional section called Political information. This section includes the party a politician belongs to, selected from among valid parties in Switzerland 4. Registration as a politician on politnetz.ch is not verified by the platform, due to the fact that politicians are not motivated to misrepresent themselves. This becomes evident in their profile information: two thirds of the politician profiles include links to their homepages, while none of the voter profiles has an external website link. 4 Political information is exclusive to politician profiles and includes 4 fields: party affiliation, political career, duration as a party member at the federal or local level, and involvement if any in Swiss "Verein", e.g. NPOs, NGOs, trade unions, or other organizations. The set of parties to choose from is limited to 65 parties and politically relevant organizations in Switzerland. Politicians are not able to insert other party names. 4/34

5 With respect to the amount of politicians in Switzerland, politnetz.ch contains a large set of politician accounts, with a certain bias towards German-speaking regions. The amount of voter accounts is more limited with respect to the size of the electorate, and voters do not have any field for party affiliation in their profile. As mentioned above, we focus exclusively on politicians accounts, excluding voters accounts from all analyses. Politicians have three major means of social interaction in politnetz.ch: i) they can support other politicians, ii) they can write posts and comments on the posts of other politicians, and iii) they can explicitly like posts, which are publicly displayed in their profile. Our politnetz.ch dataset includes the full track of interaction between politicians for more than two years, including 3441 politicians, which created support links, comments, and likes to posts. In our dataset, more than 80% of the politicians declare themselves as members of an existing party. We simplify the party affiliation data by merging local and youth versions of the same party, creating table in which each politician is mapped to one of the 9 parties, or left unaligned. The latter tag unaligned politician is an umbrella label for three distinct categories of political affiliation: 1.3% of the politicians stated they are independent politicians 5, 2.9% chose membership to non-governmental and nonprofit organizations, and the remaining 13% of the politicians who did not provide affiliation information to any party or organization, which in general are politicians active at the local level without alignment to any party at the federal level. In Table 1 we show the absolute count of politicians in the 9 parties and in the unaligned category. Party Num. polit. Colour SP 609 SVP (incl. EDU) 484 FDP 473 Christian (incl. CSP, CVP, EVP) 423 Grüne 298 GLP 286 Party Num. polit. Colour BDP 151 Pirate 93 AL (incl. PdA) 28 Unaligned 596 Independent 47 NGO/Union 101 No affiliation 448 Table 1: Number of politicians in each of the 9 parties and in the unaligned category. Politicians labeled as unaligned can be further divided into three subgroups: independent politicians, NGO/NPO/trade union representatives, and politicians with no party affiliation. The third column shows colour codes of each of the 9 parties, which we use throughout this article. 2.2 Methods Multiplex network analysis The digital traces of politicians in politnetz.ch allow us to study interaction in three network layers, one composed of supports, a second one of likes, 5 Germ. Parteilos, 5/34

6 and a third one of comments. Every node belongs to each layer, and represents a politician with an account in politnetz.ch. A politician p 1 has a directed link to another politician p 2 in the supports layer if p 1 has p 2 in its list of supported politicians. The likes and comments layers are also directed, but in addition, links have weights equivalent to respectively the amount of likes and comments that p 1 gave to the posts and comments of p 2. These three layers compose a multiplex network, also known as a multimodal, multirelational or multivariate network, (Menichetti et al., 2013), as depicted in Figure 1. The paradigmatic example of a multiplex network is a social network with different types of social relationships (friendship, business, or family) (Szell et al., 2010). Examples of previously analyzed multiplex networks are air transportation networks, in which airports are connected through different airlines, (Cardillo et al., 2012), and online videogames where players can fight, trade, or communicate with each other, (Szell et al., 2010). The concept of a multiplex network can be applied to social media in a political context, as for example politicians can follow, retweet, and mention others in Twitter (Aragón et al., 2013; Lietz et al., 2014). Comments layer Likes layer Supports layer Figure 1: Three layers of the multiplex network in Politnetz.ch. The layer of supports is directed and unweighted, and the layers of likes and comments are directed and weighted. Node colors illustrate an party affiliation, and link widths are proportional to their weights. The network layers are visualized in Figure 2, where nodes are colored according to their party alignment. Following the Fruchterman- Reingold layout algorithm (Fruchterman and Reingold, 1991), which locates connected nodes closer to each other, an initial observation of Figure 2 motivates our research question: politicians seem to be polarized along party lines when creating support links, while this pattern is not so clear for likes and comments. In this multiplex network scenario, if a layer is ignored in the analysis, relevant information about the interaction between nodes might be lost. By measuring the interdependence of interaction types among politicians, it is possible to address questions on the relationships across layers. These relationships can exist at the link (microscopic) level, where links between the same pairs 6/34

7 D. Garcia, A. Abisheva, S. Schweighofer, U. Serdült, F. Schweitzer: (a) Supports network, V = 2, 740, E = 16, 657 (b) Likes network, V = 1, 147, E = 6, 386 (c) Comments network, V = 1, 091, E = 6, 800 Figure 2: Visualization of network layers of supports, likes and comments excluding unaligned politicians. Colours of the nodes are labelled according to the parties self-reported by politicians. Party colors are reported in Table 1. The networks are drawn using the Fruchterman-Reingold layout algorithm (Fruchterman and Reingold, 1991). of nodes co-occur in two different layers, or at the group (mesoscopic) level, where the group to which each node belongs is similar across layers. To measure the overlap between layers at the link level, we calculate the Partial Jaccard similarity coefficient between the sets of links in two layers. Given that the links of some layers are weighted, we calculate this coefficient over binary versions of the weighted layers, i.e. in which all weights are taken as 1. The Jaccard coefficient measures similarity in sets, and is defined as the size of the intersection divided by the size of the union of both sets. It shows the tendency of nodes connected in one layer to also connect in another layer (more details about its calculation can be found in Appendix A.1). The second metric we apply to both at the link and the group levels is the Normalized Mutual Information (NMI) among layers. The NMI of X with respect to Y, NMI(X Y ), is the mutual information (MI) between X and Y divided over the entropy of X (see Appendix A.2). If the MI tells how much shared information there is between X and Y, and the entropy of X quantifies information content of X itself, then the NMI with respect to Y measures to which extent Y contributes to information content of X. In other words, it gives a fraction of information in X that is attributed to Y, hence the NMI is also known as the uncertainty coefficient and has values between 0 and 1. With respect to X, if the NMI 1, then knowing layer Y can predict most of the links in layer X; conversely, if the NMI 0, then there is no dependence between the layers. To compute the NMI, we first calculate information content of each matrix via the Shannon entropies with the Miller-Madow correction. Then, we compute the empirical mutual information between the layers, and finally obtain the normalized mutual information 7/34

8 with respect to each layer. At the link level, the NMI of layer X with respect to layer Y quantifies to which extent links in the network layer Y tell us about links in the network layer X. At the group level, the NMI is computed over group labels, which allows the additional comparison with the ground truth of party affiliation, i.e. how much information about party affiliation is contained in the group structure of certain layer of interaction. Network polarization Given a partition of politicians into groups, for example given their party affiliation, their network polarization can be computed through modularity metrics. We apply the Q-modularity metric (Newman, 2006) to each layer, measuring the tendency of politicians to link to other politicians in the same group and to avoid politicians of other groups. The Q-modularity of a certain partition of politicians in a layer has a value between 1 and 1, where 1 implies that all links are within groups, and 1 that all links are across groups. This metric is specially interesting, since it measures a comparison between the empirical network and the ensemble of random networks with the same in-degree and out-degree sequences, allowing us to quantify the significance of our polarization estimate against a null model (see Appendix B.1). The natural partition of politicians is given by their party labels, from which we obtain 9 groups and the unaligned group as explained in Table 1. For each layer, we compute the network polarization along party lines through the Q-modularity of party labels Q party. In addition, politicians can be partitioned in other groups rather than parties, which could have higher modularity than Q party. Finding such partition is a computationally expensive problem, which we approximately solve by applying state-of-the-art community detection algorithms, explained in Appendix B.2. This way, for each layer we have another network polarization value Q comp, computationally found from the empirical data in that layer instead of from party alignment. To understand the origins of polarization, we analyze the time series of network polarization over a sliding time window of two months, taking into account only the links created within that window (see Appendix B.3). This allows us to empirically test if polarization changes around politically relevant events, such as elections. Furthermore, the comments layer includes contextual information in the text of the comments between politicians of each group. To identify the topics discussed in each group of the comments layer, we compute the Pointwise Mutual Information (PMI) of each word in each group. The PMI of a word compares its relative frequency within the group with its frequency in all comments from all politicians, controlling for significance as explained in Appendix C. This way, we produce lists of words that highlight the discussion topics that characterize each group of politicians in the comments network. Social structure and ideological position of parties Beyond network polarization, the multiplex network among politicians contains information about the social structure of parties and the interaction of politicians across parties. To complete our picture of Swiss online political activity, we analyze the intra-party and inter-party structures present in the network. 8/34

9 First, we apply metrics from social network analysis to compare the network topologies inside each party, similarly to previous works on the US (Conover et al., 2012) and Spain (Aragón et al., 2013). With three types of social interaction, we first have to select the layer that captures the social structure of a political party in online participatory media. The supports layer carries a positive connotation that does not change or evolve in time. We choose to analyze support links, as leaders of the party or politicians with authority will accumulate more support links, but the amount of likes and comments they receive depends on their activity in politnetz.ch. For each party, we extract its internal network of supports, capturing a snapshot of its online social structure in terms of leadership. We then calculate three network metrics to estimate three structural properties of each network: Hierarchical structure: in-degree centralization. The basic idea of the network centralization is to calculate the deviation of the in- degree of each node from the most central node, which has a special position with respect to the rest in terms of influence (Freeman, 1978). This way, in-degree centralization is computed as an average difference between the in-degree of the politician with the most supports within the party and the rest (see Appendix D.1). A party with an in-degree centralization of 1 would look like a star in which the central node attracts all supports, representing a network with the strongest hierarchical structure. A party with in-degree centralization of 0 has support links distributed in a way such that every node has exactly the same amount of supporters, showing the most egalitarian and least hierarchical structure. Information efficiency: average path length. This social network metric measures the efficiency of information transport in a network: shorter path length indicates an easily traversable network, in which it takes fewer steps to reach any other node. The average path length is defined as the sum of the shortest paths between all pairs of nodes in a network normalized over the number of all possible links in a network with the same number of nodes, see Appendix D.2 for more details. We compute the average path length between all pairs of connected nodes, in order to have a measure of the information efficiency of their social structure. Social resilience: maximum k-core. The ability of a social group to withstand external stresses is known as social resilience. Social networks can display different levels of social resilience from the point of view of cascades of nodes leaving the network, having a resilient structure if such cascades have small impact. Under the assumption of rationality, the social resilience of a network can be measured through the k-core decomposition (Garcia et al., 2013), indicating how many nodes will remain under adverse conditions. This method assigns a k-core value to each node by means of a pruning mechanism, explained more in detail in Appendix D.3. In essence, the k-core captures cohesive regions of a network (Seidman, 1983), which are subsets characterized with high connectedness, formally defined as the maximal subnetwork in which all nodes have a degree at least k. Applying the k- 9/34

10 core decomposition on the subnetwork of each party, we aim at discovering such a resilient core of political leaders, estimating the social resilience of a party as the maximum k-core number of is social network. Second, we measure the level of inter-party connectivity by means of the demodularity score, which measures the opposite of Q-modularity: the tendency of a party to connect to another, as compared to a random ensemble of networks. The demodularity score measures to which extent parties interact with other parties, or how strongly politicians of one party preferentially attach to politicians of another party. This way, we compute a score of demodularity from each party to each other party, as explained more in detail in Appendix E. Party positions in ideological space We quantify the ideological position of Swiss parties along the dimensions Left-Right and Conservative-Liberal stance. This is necessary to capture the multi-party system of Switzerland, in which the position of parties cannot be simply mapped to a Left-Right dimension. We use the party scores of external surveys provided by Hermann and Städler (2014). The authors of the study give the following interpretation for both types of ideological dimensions: the Left-Right dimension expresses the understanding of the concept of the state by each party. Left-wing politics sees the role of the state in promotion of the economic and social well-being of citizens with equally distributed welfare Left-wing politics sees the role of the state in promoting the economic and social well-being ; while right-wing politics understands the primary role of the state as maintaining order and security 6. The Conservative- Liberal dimension encompasses the concepts of openness and willingness for political changes. It covers the stance of parties on economics, social and political issues, for instance, the position of a party on questions ranging from globalisation to abortion 7. These values are consistent with other sources of party positioning data in Switzerland (Germann et al., 2014), stemming from Voting Advice Applications such as preferencematcher.org 8 and smartvote.ch 9. 6 Additionally, the difference between the left- and right- politics comes with the difference in priorities set by each side. While the left-wing politics is concerned with the issues on the environment protection and asylum granting policies; the right-wing politics is committed to strengthening of security forces, and to the competitiveness of the economy. 7 In the social area, political issues such as abortion, partnership law, etc. are covered; in the economic area, questions of structural change, competition and attitude towards globalisation, including reduction of subsidies, free advertising, free trade, etc., are discussed. And finally, in the state policy field, debates are between centralisation and internationalization, such as Schengen and international peace-keeping missions, versus the preservation of the federal system /34

11 3 Polarization in a multiplex network 3.1 Layer similarity Before measuring polarization in the three layers of the politnetz.ch multiplex network, we need to verify if each layer contains additional information, or if one can be predicted based on another. Our first step is to measure the similarity between layers at the link level, quantifying the tendency of pairs of nodes to connect in more than one layer. For this analysis, we regard information in a network layer as expressed via presence or absence of the interaction links between politicians, specifically we extracted the binary, directed adjacency matrices of supports, likes, and comments. We computed link overlaps between layers, as the ratio of links of layer X that co-ocurr with links in Y, among all links in Y. We measure this overlap through the partial Jaccard coefficient of variables X and Y, which take value 1 if certain link is present in layer X and in layer Y respectively, and 0 otherwise (more details in Appendix A.1). To test statistically the significance of these metrics, we apply the jackknife bootstrapping method 10, creating subsets of the network obtained by leaving one node out. Overlaps across layers are reported in Table 2, revealing that the maximum overlap in the data is between comments and likes, where 25.45% of the comments links have an associated link in the likes layer. While significantly higher than zero, these values are relatively low, with more than 70% of the links not overlapping across layers. layer X likes supports comments supports comments likes layer Y supports likes supports comments likes comments overlap 18.13% 6.96% 7.13% 2.91% 23.9% 25.45% NMI 8.5% 3.7% 2.5% 1.2% 15.2% 16% Table 2: Link overlap and NMI across layers. Each measure was computed over jackknife bootstrap estimates on each node, giving values of 2σ < In addition, we computed the Normalized Mutual Information (NMI) between every pair of the layers which estimates how much information of one layer is contained in the links of the other one. The NMI of layer X with respect to X tells us which fraction of information of the layer X is attributed to knowing the layer Y, as explained more in detail in Appendix A.2. Table 2 shows the statistics for the NMI between the three layers. All values are significantly larger than 0, and reveal weak correlations between the layers. 8.5% of the information in the likes binary network is contained in the supports network, and less than 4% of the information in the 10 Bootstrapping is one type of the resampling methods to assess accuracy (the bias and variance) of estimates or statistics (e.g. the mean or other metric in study). Jackknife resampling is referred to obtaining a new sample called bootstrap from the existing data by leaving one observation out. With N observations we obtain N bootstrap samples. For each sample, we compute an estimate, in our case the Jaccard coefficient and the NMI. With the set of N statistics obtained from the bootstrap samples, we are able to calculate the standard deviation of our estimate. 11/34

12 supports network is contained in the likes network. Supports give 2.5% of the information in the comments binary network, and only 1.2% is contained in the opposite direction. The likes and comments network share normalized information of about 16%, showing that there is a bit of information shared across layers, but that they greatly differ in most of their variance, in particular for the supports layer. These low levels of overlap and NMI indicate that each layer contains independent information content that does not trivially simplify within a collapsed version of the network. 3.2 Network polarization The visualization of the three layers of the network in Figure 2 suggests the existence of network polarization in the supports layer, where politicians of the same party appear close to each other. We quantify the level of network polarization among politicians in each layer, given two types of partitions: i) by their party affiliation, producing the Q party modularity score, and ii) by the groups found through computational methods on the empirical data of each layer, resulting in the modularity score Q comp. Naturally, low modularity scores ( 0.5 Q < 0.3) imply that no polarization exists among politicians; high modularity scores (0.3 Q < 1) will indicate the existence of polarization. Similar values of Q party and Q comp indicate that the maximal partition in a layer is close to the ground truth of party affiliation, while different values suggest that groups in a layer are not created due to polarization along party lines. Across network layers, we hypothesize that Q party is strong in the networks with the positive semantics such as the links of supports or likes. Furthermore, we investigate the role of the unaligned politicians by measuring the network modularity including and excluding unaligned politicians. We aim at testing whether these nodes act as cross- border nodes between parties, therefore decreasing polarization when included in the analysis. For each measure of polarization, we test its statistical significance by applying the jackknife bootstrapping test on the networks by recomputing the modularity score on the bootstraps each time with one node left out. Supports Likes Comments Q 2σ C Q 2σ C Q 2σ C Q party (incl.) Q comp (incl.) Q party (excl.) Q comp (excl.) Table 3: Modularity score and number of groups found by the community detection algorithms and given politicians parties labels for the networks including (first two rows) and excluding the unaligned politicians. Standard deviations are calculated through the jackknife bootstrapping on nodes. We report the mean of modularity for bootstrap estimates, Q. From the results in Table 3, we observe that the modularity score slightly differs when unaligned politicians are ignored, having lower polarization when they are present. This indicates that 12/34

13 the unaligned group is not cohesive, as it does not represent an explicit party, and unaligned politicians connect across parties. For this reason, we remove unaligned politicians from our subsequent analysis of polarization, as their absence of affiliation does not signal their belonging to an additional group. Among the three types of interactions, the supports layer shows the highest modularity score 0.74 for both Q party and Q comp, showing that, when making a support link, politicians act as partisans. The likes layer is also polarized, but the modularity score 0.47 is lower than in the supports layer. Hence, liking a post is still a signal of an adherence to a party, however cross-party like links are more frequent in comparison to cross-party support links. Finally, the comments network divided algorithmically hints on a modular structure of the network resulting in Q comp = 0.34, however, such partition is not attributed to party membership of politicians, with Q party = This suggests that comments group politicians around discussion topics, motivating our investigation of the origins of polarization in the layer of comments in Section Group similarity across layers The similar values of Q party and Q comp for the supports layer suggest that the partition of politicians into parties might be very similar to the results of community detection algorithms, while the different values for comments suggest the opposite. To empirically test this hypothesis, we compare group and party labels among politicians in each layer and across layers through the NMI at the group level. Within each layer, the NMI tells whether group labels discovered algorithmically can be predicted via party labels and vice versa. To do this, we follow a similar methodology as in Subsection 3.1. We compute the entropies of a layer (see Appendix A.2) based on detected groups and based on party labels, then we calculate the mutual information between the different partitions, and finally obtain the NMI scores with respect to algorithmic and party partition. In this application of the NMI, random variables are the group labels of each node in each layer and party affiliation. The results in Table 4 show that supports groups and party labels mostly match, 84 90%, contrary to likes and comments. Across layers, only comments and likes show a weak similarity in group labels 8 11% and nearly no similarity to the supports layer. This result allows us to confirm that polarization in supports is due to party alignment of politicians, which does not hold for likes and comments. The high modularity score in the likes layer and the low information overlap with the comments layer tells us that the like signal has a dichotomous role as a social link. In certain situations, a like to a post signals a party affiliation; in other scenarios, it also shows politicians favour posts not only based on a party membership but due to the content of the post. 13/34

14 X parties parties parties supports supports comments Y supports likes comments likes comments likes NMI(Y X) 90.04% 3.99% 3.29% 3.83% 3.4% 11.77% NMI(X Y) 84.51% 3.87% 4.4% 4.12% 4.5% 8.56% Table 4: Normalized mutual information of the group labels computationally found for each layer, and the party label. Groups of supports are very similar to parties, but the rest has low mutual information. 4 Origins of network polarization 4.1 Topic analysis of comment groups The above results show the existence of a partition of politicians in the comment layer that conveys certain polarization (Q comp = 0.336), but which does not match to their party alignment. This suggests that comments happen more often across parties, partitioning politicians into groups by some other property besides party affiliation. To understand the reasons for such partition, we investigate the content of the comments between the politicians of each group. 10 of the 15 groups are very small they contain reduced sets of politicians that exchange very few comments and are isolated from the rest. The 5 largest groups, which cover most of the politicians, have sufficient comments to allow us an analysis of their words. For each group, we computed a vector of word frequencies, ignoring German stopwords 11. To measure the extent to which a word is characteristic for a group of politicians, we compute the Pointwise Mutual Information (PMI) of the frequency of the word in the group, compared to the frequency of the word in the set of all comments (more details in Appendix C). We quantify the significance of the PMI through a ratio test, only selecting words with p < 0.01, producing the word lists reported in Table 5. All five groups have words with significant PMI, showing that they can be differentiated from other groups with respect to the words that politicians used in their comments. This difference highlights the topics discussed in every group, showing that the group structure in the comments layer is driven by topical interests. While some straightforward topics can be observed, especially for C4, we refrain from interpreting the terms of Table 5 within the Swiss politics context. These results show that modularity in the comments layer is topic-driven, and not party-driven, grouping politicians along their interests and competences. 4.2 The temporal component of polarization Our approach to polarization allows its measurement through behavioral traces, which lets us create real-time estimates with high resolution. The politnetz.ch dataset provides timing information for the creation of each support, like, and comment, giving us the opportunity to study the evolution of polarization through time. Including a time component in our analysis has the /34

15 C1 C2 C3 C4 C5 1 ZauggGraf SA Noser Fatah Murmeln 2 Standardsprache Hilton Mängel Abbas wolf 3 GfSt Dragovic Noten PA unsre 4 Fitze Botschaftsasyl PK pal Lei 5 Digitalpolitik Hollande Raucher Hamas Berufsbildungsfonds Spahr Weiterbildung Libanon Dokument 7 Bahnpolizei Jungsozialisten Asylsuchenden Gaza Wolf 8 Kamera P21 WidmerSchlumpf Jordanien Atommüll 9 Hannes Affentranger Pensionskassen Westbank einwenig 10 Jeanneret fur Liberalisierung palästinensischer Gripen words comm users Table 5: Top words for each of the 5 largest comments groups, ordered by PMI. Number of words with PMI significant at the 99% confidence level, and amounts of users and comments in the group. Word colors classify them as follows: purple for Swiss Politician names, red for economic terms, blue for terms related to immigration, gray for words related to the conflict in the Middle East, green for terms related to security issues, and black for the rest. The top words significantly differ across groups, indicating that the partition in comments is aligned on the topics of discussion. potential to reveal periods with higher and lower polarization, allowing us to detect potential sources that create polarization. We construct a set of time series of polarization along party lines Q party (t) in all three layers with a sliding window of two months, as explained in Appendix B.3. Figure 3 shows the time series of network polarization along party lines for the three layers of the network. The comments layer shows negligible levels of polarization, fluctuating around 0 for the whole time period. Polarization in likes shows an increasing pattern up to late 2011, reaching a value above 0.6 shortly before the Swiss federal parliament election in Right after the election, polarization in likes strongly corrects to levels slightly above 0.2. Similarly, polarization in supports has relatively stable values around 0.6 before the federal election, dropping to values below 0.3 right afterwards. This analysis shows that network polarization, as portrayed in the online activity of politicians, is not a stable property of a political system, revealing that politically relevant events bias politician behavior in two ways: polarization reaches maxima during campaign periods, and polarization levels relax quickly after elections. The pattern in likes suggests that politicians avoid awarding a like to a politician of another party when elections are close, but in other periods they display a less polarized pattern that 15/34

16 Jun 09 Sep 09 Dec 09 Mar 10 Jun 10 Sep 10 Dec 10 Mar 11 Jun 11 Sep 11 Dec 11 Mar 12 Jun 12 Sep 12 Dec 12 Mar 13 Jun 13 Sep 13 Dec 13 Network Polarization Supports Likes Comments Figure 3: Time series of Q-modularity by party labels of the layers of supports (red), likes (blue) and comments (green). The grey dashed line denotes Swiss federal parliament election in Two trends can be observed: polarization among politicians peaks at pre-election time in the network of likes, and post-election time is characterized by lower levels of polarization in likes and comments. allows likes across parties. On the other hand, polarization in supports stays generally high in the whole period of analysis but after the election, which suggests that some election winners might concentrate support, lowering party polarization along coalition structures. These observations, while sensitive to the size and activity in the network, appear in contrast with the control scenario of comments, in which no artificial pattern of party polarization appears in the whole period. 5 Party structures In this section, we focus in two aspects of online political activity that are not captured by polarization metrics, i.e. intra-party structures and inter- party connectivity. In particular, we want to answer two questions: Do parties with different ideologies create different social structures in online communities? And do parties with similar positions in political space connect more to each other, despite the general pattern of polarization? 16/34

17 5.1 Intra-party structures Previous research on the online political activity of users in the US discovered that right-leaning users showed higher online social cohesion than left-leaning users (Conover et al., 2012). In the following, we extend the quantification of each party both in its social structure and position in ideological space. With respect to the latter, we locate the ideology of each party in the twodimensional space of Left-Right and Conservative-Liberal dimensions. To ensure the statistical relevance of our metrics, we restrict our analysis to the 6 parties with more than 200 politicians each, which cover the two- dimensional spectrum of Swiss politics. We analyze the social structure of each party based on the supports subnetwork among the politicians of the party, capturing the asymmetric relationships that lead to prestige and popularity. On each of these party subnetworks, we quantify three metrics related to relevant properties of online social networks: hierarchical structures through in-degree centralization, information efficiency through average path length, and social resilience through maximum k-core numbers (see Appendix D). While these three metrics are not independent from each other, they capture three components of online political activity that potentially differentiate parties: how popular their leaders are in comparison to a more egalitarian structure, how efficient their social structure is for transmitting information, and how big is the core of densely connected politicians who would support each other under adverse conditions. Figure 4 shows the value of the three social network metrics versus the position of each party in both dimensions. The two parties in the farthest right part of the spectrum, SVP and FDP, show higher average path lengths and lower maximum k-core numbers than left-wing parties such as SP and Grüne. This points to a difference in online activity in Switzerland dependent on the the political position of parties: right parties have created online social networks with lower information efficiency and lower social resilience. This poses a contrast with previous findings for US politics, in which politically aligned communities displayed the opposite pattern. This leads to the conclusion that the position of an online community in the left- right political spectrum does not universally define the properties of its social structure, and that particularities of each political system create different patterns. There is no clear pattern of in-degree centralization in the Left-Right or Liberal-Conservative dimensions, but green parties (GLP and Grüne) show a significantly higher in-degree centralization than the rest. This result can be explained by the structure of the Swiss government, which is composed of seven politicians from a coalition of various parties. At the time of the study, this coalition includes politicians from the other four parties, excluding both GLP and Grüne. This would give an incentive to these parties to highlight a relevant member in order to gain a seat in the seven- member government, and thus creating higher in-degree centralization in online media. 17/34

18 in-degree centralization Grüne SP Christian GLP SVP/EDU FDP average path length Grüne SP Christian GLP FDP SVP/EDU maximum k-core SP Grüne Christian GLP SVP/EDU FDP Left --- Right Left --- Right Left --- Right in-degree centralization SVP/EDU Grüne SP Christian GLP FDP average path length SVP/EDU FDP Christian Grüne SP GLP maximum k-core SVP/EDU Grüne Christian SP GLP FDP Conservative --- Liberal Conservative --- Liberal Conservative --- Liberal Figure 4: Social network metrics versus their position in ideological space, Left-Right position (top), Conservative-Liberal position (bottom). The supports subnetworks of parties with federal representation and more than 200 politicians each in politnetz.ch. 5.2 Inter-party connectivity Our second question tackles the activity across parties with respect to their political position, hypothesizing that parties closer in ideological space will be more likely to connect to each other. To do so, we first require a measure to estimate the tendency of one party to connect to another under the presence of polarization. To complement our analysis of Q-modularity, we use demodularity between pairs of parties, comparing their tendency to connect with what could be expected from a random network (see Appendix E). Negative demodularity indicates that a party consistently avoids interaction with another party, contrary to positive demodularity, which indicates that interactions are more frequent than expected at random. Figure 5 shows a visualization of the network of politicians aggregated by parties, for each layer of interaction. It can be observed that demodularity scores have strong negative values in the supports layer, where all links have a negative weight (more details in Appendix E). This is in line with the strong polarization among party lines, which makes support links to stay within parties. In addition, the overall level of outgoing negative demodularity shows a certain level of heterogeneity, as some parties have a stronger tendency to not support any politician from another party. In the likes layer, demodularity scores are less negative, indicating that there are 18/34

19 AL SVP/EDU SP AL Christian GLP BDP BDP SP GLP SVP/EDU FDP BDP GLP Piraten SP SVP/EDU FDP FDP AL Christian Christian Grune Piraten Grune Piraten Grune Figure 5: Networks of demodularity across parties for supports (left), likes (centre), and comments (right). Link width and color intensity is proportional to demodularity score between parties, colored blue for positive values and red for negative ones. Node size is proportional to the amount of politicians of each party. Demodularity scores are strongly negative for supports, weakly negative for likes, and both positive and negative for comments. weaker incentives to avoid giving a like to a politician of another party, compared to supports. Positive scores are only present in the comments layer, which shows that politicians are more likely to comment posts of other parties, creating debates with opponents. To relate the demodularity with the position in ideological space of parties, we measured the Euclidean distance between pairs of parties in a two-dimensional ideological space, explained in detail in Appendix F. Our hypothesis is that in layers of interaction with positive connotation (supports and likes), parties that are further from each other have weaker cross-party interactions, in contrast to the comments layer, where links can be used to express disagreement and thus political distance increases with cross-party interaction. To test these hypotheses, we compute the Pearson correlation coefficient of the demodularity score of the pairs of parties versus the political Euclidean distance between them (see Appendix G for details). This correlation coefficient allows us to empirically test the existence of a linear relationship between ideological distance and cross-party interaction in each layer. Supports Likes Comments r Pearson (p = 0.37) (p < ) 0.45 (p < ) Table 6: Pearson correlation coefficients of the demodularity scores between parties and their pairwise Euclidean distance. Table 6 shows the results for the three correlation coefficients. First, the supports layer shows no significant correlation, as data is not sufficient to reject the null hypothesis that both variables are not related. This points to the high level of polarization in supports, which makes links across parties so scarce that demodularity scores are equally negative for parties close and far 19/34

20 in ideological space. The layer of likes shows a significant negative correlation, indicating that demodularity is higher between parties with closer ideologies. On the other hand, the correlation in the comments layer is positive, showing that politicians are more likely to participate in online debates with politicians of parties that hold opposite views. This highlights the meaning of comments, which are mainly used to argue with politicians of other parties as opposed to likes, which are used to agree with politicians with similar views, even though they might not belong to the same party. 6 Discussion Our work explores behavioral aspects of political polarization, measuring network polarization over the digital traces left by politicians in politnetz.ch. Our approach is centered around the construction of a multiplex network with politicians as nodes and three layers of directed links: one with support links, a second one with link weights as the amount of comments a politician made to another politician, and a third one with weights counting the amount of times a politician liked the posts of another. We studied network polarization in the three layers as the level of intra-party cohesion with respect to inter-party cohesion, measuring network polarization as the modularity with respect to party labels, using Newman s Q-modularity metric. This methodology allows us to investigate polarization at a scale and resolution not achievable by traditional opinion survey methods, including the time evolution of polarization on a daily basis. Furthermore, we provide a quantitative analysis of the ways in which politicians utilize participatory media, the content of discussion groups between politicians of different parties, and the conditions that increase and decrease online network polarization. We compared the information shared across the three layers, and found that each layer contains a significant amount of link and community information that is not included in any other layer. The layers of supports and likes revealed significant patterns of polarization with respect to party alignment, unlike the comments layer, which has negligible polarization. This is particularly interesting with respect to opinion dynamics models, which frequently assume that the presence of opinion polarization implies a bias in the underlying communication network. While polarization is clearly present on politnetz with respect to like and support links, it does not seem to have decisive influence on overal communication. We applied community detection algorithms at all three layers, and compared the computationally found groups with the parties of the Swiss system. At the comments layer, the community detection algorithms reveal that a partitioning of politicians conveys higher modularity than party alignment, suggesting that groups in comments are not party-driven. This is confirmed by a content analysis of the comments in each group, where the most informative terms show that each group discusses different topics. At the supports layer, the partition of politicians into parties is very similar to the maximal partition found by algorithms, suggesting that party alignment is nearly the most polarizing partition of politicians. Further analysis will be necessary to test this observation, measuring how the party alignment of a politician might be predicted by its social context. In addition, our work focuses on data 20/34

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